Trust-by-Design – Strong Security Arguments for Symmetric Key Cryptography

Informazioni relative al progetto

SymTrust

ID dell’accordo di sovvenzione: 101097056

DOI

10.3030/101097056

Data della firma CE 23 Maggio 2023

Data di avvio 1 Settembre 2023

Data di completamento 31 Agosto 2028

Finanziato da

• European Research Council (ERC)

Costo totale

€ 2 485 000,00

Contributo UE

€ 2 485 000,00

Coordinato da

RUHR-UNIVERSITAET BOCHUM
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SymTrust (Trust-by-Design – Strong Security Arguments for Symmetric Key Cryptography)

Periodo di rendicontazione: 2023-09-01 al 2026-02-28

Sintesi del contesto e degli obiettivi generali del progetto

Being able to communicate privately and securely is essential in today’s digital world. From online banking and cloud storage to private messaging, our personal and professional lives depend on data being protected from unauthorized access.

Cryptography is the key technology that makes this possible. In particular, symmetric cryptography—the use of shared secret keys to encrypt and decrypt data—protects the vast majority of information that flows through the internet and is stored in digital systems. Its importance will only continue to grow as our reliance on digital infrastructure increases.

While symmetric cryptography has seen remarkable progress in terms of speed and efficiency, the same cannot be said for how we understand and guarantee its security. Many of today’s cryptographic security arguments rely on unproven or unrealistic assumptions, and even the attacks used to test them often rest on shaky ground.

This ERC Advanced Grant aims to change that. By developing cryptographic primitives whose security can be demonstrated from first principles, we aim to build the next generation of cryptographic tools: fast, efficient, and mathematically trustworthy foundations for secure digital communication.

Lavoro eseguito dall’inizio del progetto fino alla fine del periodo coperto dalla relazione e principali risultati finora ottenuti

The project is advancing steadily from foundational research toward practical, trustworthy cryptographic designs. During this period, we focused on understanding how the building blocks of cryptography interact, developing rigorous ways to argue about their security, and creating tools to analyze potential weaknesses.

Our work has led to several publications at top international conferences in cryptography. We clarified when certain cipher components are uniquely defined, resolving ambiguities that have long complicated security analyses. We established design principles that prevent specific structural weaknesses, ensuring that new ciphers can be provably resistant to entire classes of attacks. We also created a framework that connects abstract security proofs with practical attack methods, helping bridge the gap between theory and practice. Finally, we developed efficient tools to test and strengthen modern cipher designs that use modular addition, expanding our understanding of this important technique.

Progressi oltre lo stato dell’arte e potenziale impatto previsto (incluso l’impatto socioeconomico e le implicazioni sociali più ampie del progetto fino ad ora)

The advances described above all go beyond the state of the arts and provide a strong theoretical foundation for the next phase of the project, which will focus on developing practical design tools and complete trustworthy cryptographic systems.